Baker and Mason are graduate students for Medill on the Hill, a program of Northwestern University in which students serve as mobile journalists reporting on events in and around Washington, D.C.
Seventy years after Russell Kirk published “The Conservative Mind,” the center named after him revealed plans to develop a school to train conservative thinkers for the future.
The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal announced The School of Conservative Studies at a Dec. 5 event in Washington, D.C., that was headlined by former Vice President Mike Pence. Pence lauded Kirk as “the intellectual father of the American conservative movement [and] the author of a book we celebrate 70 years now that literally changed the course, not of a movement, but of a country.”
Written in 1953, Kirk’s opus helped fuel the modern conservative movement for decades. The philosophical text promoted ideas like societal order and traditionalism by highlighting prominent conservative thinkers like poet T.S. Eliot and 18th century Irish statesman Edmund Burke.
The book’s 70th anniversary comes as the GOP wrestles with evolving party dynamics. While former President Donald Trump dominates the party, some influential Republicans say he is not a conservative. A recent study by the Associated Press found that just 9 percent of Republicans feel that they can speak openly about their views on college campuses.
One speaker praised Pence’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, when he rejected Trump’s calls for Pence to declare that the defeated president had actually won the 2020 election.
“Mike Pence will be validated and honored across the political spectrum for the courage that he's shown on that day,” said John Wood Jr., a national ambassador for Braver Angels, a crosspartisan group focused on depolarization. “You just may not be able to see it in the passions of the moment, but we feel that vindication rising.”
Kelsey Baker and Anastasia Mason
Wood’s comments came the day before 10 Wisconsin Republicans who supported Trump’s false election-win claims in 2020 agreed to acknowledge President Joe Biden’s legitimate election. They agreed to not serve as presidential electors in 2024.
Despite Trump’s dominance in the battle for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, no one mentioned his name throughout the event.
Representatives of the Kirk Center did not respond to requests for interviews to explain whether their new school (slated to open in 2025) was designed to offer an alternative to the MAGA-dominated Republican Party. However, the center’s director made it clear that he believes the conservative movement needs an intellectual revival.
“Contemporary students have little exposure to serious conservative thought,” said Jeffrey Nelson, executive director and CEO of the Kirk Center. “What's particularly distressing to me, and I know to many of you, is that young conservatives today, many at least, now exhibit high levels of civic and cultural illiteracy. There is then the urgent need for learning experiences that engage intellectual conservatism at its best.”
During the event, a panel of young activists presented their ideas on the current struggles and the future of the conservative movement. According to research from Tufts University, only 65 percent of young Republicans identify as conservatives, compared to 81 percent of older Republicans. In the last presidential election, just 37 percent of voters aged 18-29 voted Republican.
“When they look at conservatism, they assume that it's a stale political philosophy that protects old, withered and sometimes even bad ideas,” said University of Notre Dame doctoral student Elayne Allen, who served on the panel. “And at worst, they see a bunch of reactionaries who dislike any kind of change, and this might be true of some conservatives, but I would argue that thinking is actually quite indispensable to conservatism.”
The panelists said conservative politicians have struggled to draw young people to the polls at a time when the country needs more spiritual and moral guidance.
“The conservatives and ‘The Conservative Mind’ frequently lose the political battle of the moment,” Wood said. “What Kirk is valorizing, oftentimes, is the necessity for standing up for lost causes.”
The push to highlight younger conservatives and create the School of Conservative Studies is at least partly rooted in the ideological divide between generations. While studies have shown that Americans tend to get more conservative as they age, the movement would benefit from younger supporters now, especially after Republicans took major losses in Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio in November’s elections.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.